I think this post (page 33)
kewin wrote:I don't mind rare outcomes in monthly litters every once in a while, but for me seeing a swap thread where 90% of comments are folks looking for the same one pet is not fun at all, and I dread being on the short end of the stick even more often. I would much rather have more pets with more diverse rarities in monthly litters, than have a single random rare slapped among them.
For example, let's just look at August and September releases - vast majority of pets are either very common or extremely common. You have just updated your rarity system - use it! Why not have more uncommon, very uncommon, extremely uncommon pets? It has plenty of benefits:
1) they wouldn't be as hard to trade for as a rare would, while keeping the feeling of getting a less common outcome,
2) if everything is very common then I really don't have an incentive to trade with others - I will rarely be missing more than 3-4 pets for an entire month, so my trading activity is small. But this would increase trading activity without demanding me to browse the swap thread for hours and speedruning sending trades,
3) the pets will become rare faster than a super common, so it will become a viable trade option for older pets sooner,
4) if you decide on a given month to also add a rare outcome on top of diverse rarities, it might also create a situation where the lucky owner may be more interested in trading his pet for the monthly uncommon pet(s) that he missed, rather than creating insane demand that boosts the prices beyond sanity.
Of course, this would have to be properly balanced with the amount of pets that players can obtain each month. But I do believe that there's a golden (ha ha, golden gacha dog) middle to find between satisfying the rare seekers and the casual players. Looking for a rare litter outcome can be tedious and frustrating, but it really doesn't have to be.
There's already over 10 years worth of challenges and goals for people who are interested in challenging themselves with trading hard to obtain pets.
Also, another thing I'm afraid of is that there's already lot of foul play on the forum from players who mass buy rare outcomes from unsuspecting players for massive underpay (sorry, "very fair price" of 1c$) for resale, and monthly rare outcomes will only further promote this behavior.
and this post (page 34)
Animall wrote:Why should CS incentivize players to play the game minimally/irregularly? I understand that you are an inactive player, and personally I don't think the website should support that behavior. From a business standpoint, CS makes money from advertisements and from C$ purchases. If you are not playing regularly or purchasing CS, I personally don't think you should get the same experience of the game that regular players do.
I don't mean to be harsh, but the reality is that CS current rarity model incentivizes players to discontinue playing for long periods of time. This is (imo) an unsustainable business model. The bottom of the forum indicates that the last population "boost" on CS was in 2017. I remember that number increasing every single year. Anyways, the current model seems like it's;
1. Monthly litters are boring and valueless, no reason to play. Can come back after months and mass trade for missed outcomes easily.
2. Big events only 4 times of the year, the rest of the time players are gone.
3. You buy or trade for store pets, stop playing CS for those months-long breaks, and your pets/account has gained value.
I think CS should aim to make the game more accessible and exciting for players in order to retain and gain more players on the site. I don't think the 4 event, store pets, useless monthlies model is working :( its not for me anyways.
both do a really good job explaining not only my personal thoughts, but why changes are needed to the monthly pet adoptions. as Animall said, they are kinda boring if you're not super involved (which I'll be honest, I'm not most of the time; I'm currently riding the Halloween adrenaline wave, but I’m not active at all between events). and as kewin said, the monthlies are usually the same boring rarity (commons range), which takes forever to reach rare status, bringing in Animall's point that this "incentivizes players to discontinue playing for long periods of time." i know the poll is closed, but i wanted to bump these two posts since i feel like they're great additions to the conversation and work really well together.